[Buddha-l] Sabba Sutta

[Dan Lusthaus]

Richard Hayes wrote:

> Aha, I see you are now claiming occult powers to see the intentions of
other
> people's minds. Have any swampland in Florida you'd like to try to sell
me?

Nothing occult, just being a Mimamsika for a moment and cognizing an
absence.

> I think the theory has better uses than racial stereotyping of any sort.

Possibly. The problem is Jung himself deployed it in that way. It wasn't a
misappropriation by some deluded other (though there were some of those as
well).

> the so-called collective unconscious is a name of convenience for
inherited
> genetic propensities to think in a certain way that has been passed down
from
> one's recent and distant ancestors.

As you admit, grouping people by recent and distant ancestors lends itself
to racial stereotyping. Jung not only found the Jewish mind an inferior
antithesis to the German mind, he had similar opinions of the inferiority of
many ethnic groups, such as Irish, etc. Common ancestors was one of the key
ingredients of racial identity, a form of academic discourse that had gained
prominence in Europe since the mid-1800s. Jung was not formulating his
theories despite those ideas, or in ignorance of them, but under their sway.
He eventually (after a falling out with some Nazi echelons in 1939) came to
see Nazism and the war as the crystallization of a horrible German shadow
(maybe a decade of reading Nietzsche finally did its work, maybe getting
disenfranchised helped).

> So I agree with you in saying "Racism, boo!" It is naughty to be racist.
On
> that I bet everyone on buddha-l agrees. But I also still hold to the view
> that Jung denied exactly the sort of collective unconscious that you
ascribed
> to him.

I'm not sure exactly what I am supposed to have ascribed to him, aside from
his using the notion of collective unconscious to stereotype "races", i.e.,
entire groups of people in genetic affinity. It would be one thing to say
that people sharing a cultural context also share certain attitudes and
behaviors. It's another to ascribe that to genetic history. To me that is as
absurd as thinking that East Asian people are "genetically" incapable of
differentiating "L" and "R" -- either aurally or orally. It may be the case
that East Asian adults who have grown up there have such difficulties (my
wife does), but as we see with first generation Japanese, Chinese, etc.,
born in the USA, they have no such genetic difficulty at all.

> I am not sure what Dignaga was
> up to. I don't think he was especially interested in Buddhism at all.

I do. Partial explanation for why it might look that way in the previous
message(s).

>I think
> he was interested in assessing whether it is possible to claim to know
> anything.

Part of his "genetic" Yogacara inheritance.

> But surely that interest was in no way unique to Buddhists or to
> any particular school of thought. It was a topic of interest to everyone,
and
> Dignaga wrote about it in the most general possible terms, as if he were
> writing a text that anyone anywhere could find valuable regardless of
> sectarian affiliation.

Again, reasons for his ecumenical system discussed previously. But he does
have his own arguments, and does allow there is knowledge. He is not a
skeptic, or else he would have simply become a madhyamakan and eschewed
pramana altogether rather than taking it to new heights. The conclusion of
Alambana-pariksa, for instance, is not that there is no alambana or that
it's all an illusion, or who the hell knows anyway. It is that the alambana
as experienced in vijnapti-matra (he uses different terms), and that whether
the alambana that appears reflects something extra-mental or not is "as you
wish" (ci dgar brjod par bya'o).

rnam par shes pa las de gnyis gzhan nyid dang gzhan ma yin pa nyid du ci
dgar brjod par bya'o

Xuanzang translates this:

As to whether the two rūpas—viz. indriya and vi.saya—and consciousness are
the same or different, or whether they are neither the same nor different:
One can say according to one’s wishes (隨樂, yathā-āśaya).

That, my friend, is Yogacara epistemology (I devoted 600 pages of a book to
demonstrating that).

Dan